Mechanical Performance of Recycled Thermoplastic and Flax Fiber Based Composite

A new direction in biocomposite manufacturing is to integrate natural fibers and recycled polymers for manufacturing of some innovative products for various industrial uses including automotive under hood parts. The performance of these new materials are comparable to existing ones even with the replacement of synthetic fiber with biodegradable natural fiber from agricultural residue and with the shift from pure polymer to recycled polymer.

Thermoplastic are reinforced with flax fiber mostly used to develop biocomppsite. Most of the research reviewed indicated that very limited work had been done on using flax fiber with recycled post consumer thermoplastic to make biocomposite. The goal of this research is to develop recycled biocomposite material by using flax fiber as a reinforcement and recycled post consumer thermoplastic as matrix and streamline the manufacturing process with optimal processing condition and fiber percentage. An attempt has been made to use recycled thermoplastic to make biocomposite products. In this work recycled polyolefin based thermoplastic is used as a matrix and oilseed flax fiber is used as a reinforcement material to manufacture Biocomposite. The recycled biocomposite material is used to make product through compression, rotational and Injection molding process. The physical, mechanical and thermal performance of the molded product were investigated. Evaluation of the biocomposite properties were performed using series of ASTM standard tests. The result shows that recycled thermoplastic composite is suitable to make compression and Injection molding products and it is not suitable for rotational molding product.